Huge discrepancy between Top 10 and Google Analytics stats

Top 10 tracks every single visit on your pages i.e. it doesn’t track unique visitors.

Ajay, may I know if top 10 includes traffic from bots/crawlers?

As far as I know, Google Analytics excludes most bot traffics by a simple fact that most bots don’t execute JS code. So my question is, is Top 10 counter executed on browser (using JS/AJAX) or on the server (when serving the page)?

The Top 10 counter is executed over JS/Ajax. It calls a JS script (written in PHP) which in turn updates the database.

Hi Ajay. As Koroikoroi has mentioned, apart from tracking unique visitors, Analytics also does track every single visit, minus bots visits. That’s why I wondered why such a huge discrepancy

Do you have Jetpack analytics installed by any chance. Also do you have w3 total cache installed by any chance?

I just checked my analytics recently, and I do agree with polokina that Top 10’s count is much higher than Google Analytics for some reason.

To me, the top suspect is still bots. I was likely wrong before when I said that the use of JS/Ajax excludes most bots, because nowadays most search engine crawlers can execute Javascript code, so it’s probably fair to assume that other bots also execute JS.

Nevertheless, I believe that GA can most of the time distinguish and exclude hits made by bots (probably via User Agent detection).

I had an experience writing a server side counter and I was so surprised that most of the recorded hits actually came from bots, especially after a page gets shared to social networks such as Twitter.

So, if we want to find out why the count seems high, may be the best way to start is to log each hit’s User Agent. This will be expensive but it can be enabled only in debug mode.

P.S. I don’t use Jetpacks. I use W3 Total Cache.

Hi Ajay. Yes I use W3TC but I don’t use Jetpack analytics

Hi, Do you think it is possible to run simple check in terms of just refreshing some site pages. Top 10 will increment the count on each request.

I’m not so sure how Google Analytics would do it.